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Glad to hear that you're happy, but if you want to talk about coverage, use a coverage map, not some anecdote about how your phone worked in the bar, and your buddy's didn't.

In California and Pennsylvania, Sprint is obviously second-rate.

In California and Pennsylvania, Sprint is obviously second-rate.

I'm glad you are impatient, but I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. After all, this posting is about the cosmetic launch of one of the first commercial WCDMA phones (excl. FOMA). Cosmetic, since the phone itself won't be in stores until somewhere in the 1st half of 2003. But at least we get to see the slideware already.

Before WCDMA will be launched massively, some things need to be sorted out. There need to be phones of course, or any network launch is useless. And some mandatory features like roaming (shown last year between Vodafone Spain and J-Phone Japan) and WCDMA to GSM handover (hand off) are a must. Last week we saw reports of the first demonstrations of such a handover in the Telia/Hi3G network in Sweden, with a Sony Ericsson handset. And we saw a network launched (Mobilkom Austria). But what is such a launch worth when there are no handsets. That said, it's excellent news that Nokia already shows us the slides.

CDMA2000 has been launched earlier, yes, since it's a relatively small upgrade from IS-95. On the other hand, upgrading from GSM to WCDMA is a revolution in the radio access network. If EU operators are looking at any alternatives to WCDMA, it would be EDGE, a natural upgrade from GSM, delivering throughput in excess of 384 kbps and therefore labeled "3G", and somewhat behind WCDMA in network development. No phones announced either. Will probably fly high in the growing American GSM markets.

The situation in Japan is particularly curious, since they're looking at 3 operators each deploying a not-interoperable wireless access technology. There KDDI's CDMA2000 1x (offering 144 kbps), NTT DoCoMo's proprietary FOMA system (a WCDMA dialect), and J-Phone's true WCDMA. KDDI appears to be winning, which is not because CDMA2000 is technologically superior, but because there's variety and choice in phones.

Let's see where WCDMA is going, there's a big test for one of the keenest WCDMA investors coming up soon.

I'm glad you are impatient, but I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. After all, this posting is about the cosmetic launch of one of the first commercial WCDMA phones (excl. FOMA). Cosmetic, since the phone itself won't be in stores until somewhere in the 1st half of 2003. But at least we get to see the slideware already.

Before WCDMA will be launched massively, some things need to be sorted out. There need to be phones of course, or any network launch is useless. And some mandatory features like roaming (shown last year between Vodafone Spain and J-Phone Japan) and WCDMA to GSM handover (hand off) are a must. Last week we saw reports of the first demonstrations of such a handover in the Telia/Hi3G network in Sweden, with a Sony Ericsson handset. And we saw a network launched (Mobilkom Austria). But what is such a launch worth when there are no handsets. That said, it's excellent news that Nokia already shows us the slides.

CDMA2000 has been launched earlier, yes, since it's a relatively small upgrade from IS-95. On the other hand, upgrading from GSM to WCDMA is a revolution in the radio access network. If EU operators are looking at any alternatives to WCDMA, it would be EDGE, a natural upgrade from GSM, delivering throughput in excess of 384 kbps and therefore labeled "3G", and somewhat behind WCDMA in network development. No phones announced either. Will probably fly high in the growing American GSM markets.

The situation in Japan is particularly curious, since they're looking at 3 operators each deploying a not-interoperable wireless access technology. There KDDI's CDMA2000 1x (offering 144 kbps), NTT DoCoMo's proprietary FOMA system (a WCDMA dialect), and J-Phone's true WCDMA. KDDI appears to be winning, which is not because CDMA2000 is technologically superior, but because there's variety and choice in phones.

Let's see where WCDMA is going, there's a big test for one of the keenest WCDMA investors coming up soon.

Thats actually not true... Some European companies have actually managed to do handover between GPRS and WLAN and vice versa. (Quick google search reveals this. Its possible and is definitely one of the next big things...